Word: robots
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...wasn't until refrigerator-size boulders began hurtling down from above that the scientists sitting in an Anchorage, Alaska, control room started to get seriously worried. Until then the robot known as Dante II had successfully negotiated a steep, muddy descent and ambled unconcernedly through hot steam and poisonous gases. But even a 10-ft.-tall, 1,700-lb. automaton has its limits, and multiton chunks of rock moving at high speed were beyond Dante's. "That big one," said Carnegie Mellon University robotics expert John Bares, pointing nervously at a video screen after a rockslide, "would've wiped...
...misstep, not a rock, that toppled Dante, and only after the robot had completed its main mission: a detailed study of the crater floor 300 ft. below the rim of Alaska's active Mount Spurr volcano that included a 3-D survey of the hellish terrain and an analysis of gases issuing from belching vents. Among the significant results: the first maps of the crater's surface, normally hidden by outcroppings and haze. Dante also discovered scant sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide in the noxious air, implying that the volcano, which erupted in 1992, will probably stay quiet...
...important as this news was to volcano experts and the people of Anchorage, just 80 miles from Mount Spurr, the volcano study was perhaps the least noteworthy part of the robot's mission. Despite the final slipup, which toppled Dante and left it stranded on the steep mountain slope, the 10-day trek went a long way toward proving the potential of a technology that could let humans explore a wide range of sites too hazardous to visit in person -- other volcanoes, deep caves, the barren wastes of Antarctica, the ocean floor and even the surfaces of the moon...
Dante II is the brainchild of Bares and William ("Red") Whittaker, the principal research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's robotics lab and a legend among robot designers. Whittaker helped design the machine that cleaned up the Three Mile Island reactor after its near meltdown in 1979, and he oversaw development of a system that will automatically inspect the heat-resistant tiles on NASA's space shuttles...
Last month ESA's science director, Roger Bonnet, unveiled a bold proposal: an open-ended program to colonize the moon. The program could begin as early as the year 2000 with exploration by robot orbiters and landers, followed by installation of automated scientific instruments. Finally, robots would build a base, which could be ready for human occupation in 2020, says Bonnet. A similar proposal has come from Japan, where a group called the Lunar and Planetary Society set out its own ideas for a robot-made moon base that could be built by 2024 for $28 billion. Both plans contain...